Adobe preparing full-featured Flash for mobile phones

Newscom

Adobe has made Flash Lite on a range of smartphones. Now, the company will roll out Flash 10 – a major upgrade from the limited functionalities of Lite.

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October 5, 2009

By Matthew Shaer

First came Flash Lite, a software application which brought the processing power of Adobe Flash to mobile phones and pint-sized electronic devices such as the Chumby. (We have a Chumby, incidentally, and swear by it.) Flash Lite gets the job done, but many bloggers have complained about the substantial load times and the perpetual suck on battery life.

Today, Adobe rolled out Flash Player 10.1 software for a range of mobile devices, from smartphones to smartbooks, netbooks, and PCs. Flash 10.1, which will allow mobile users to access content created using the Adobe Flash Platform, is being billed as a worthy replacement for Flash Lite.

“With Flash Player moving to new mobile platforms, users will be able to experience virtually all Flash technology based Web content and applications wherever they are,” David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president at Adobe's Platform Business Unit, said in a statement.

Adobe is claiming that Flash 10.1 will boost rendering performance on mobile systems by more than 87 percent; memory consumption on mobiles, meanwhile, would be decreased by 87 percent. (See video below for a full demonstration.)

According to Adobe, a public developer beta of Flash 10.1 will be made available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and a handful of desktop operating systems by the end of the year. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS won't arrive until 2010.

"We are excited to join Adobe and other industry leaders in the Open Screen Project," Sundar Pichai, vice president of Product Management at Google, said in a statement. "This initiative supports our common goal to move the Web forward as a platform and to spur innovation in the industry through technology such as Adobe Flash."

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